First national HIV/AIDS conference underway

Zimbabwe on Tuesday opened its first national HIV/AIDS conference to establish more effective ways of tackling the pandemic, a local newspaper, the Zim Observer, reported. "Zimbabwe's first national HIV and AIDS conference will provide a forum to share programme successes, lessons learned and current model activities, in order to point the way forward to national expansion of these successes," a conference document stated. The Southern African country has been in the grip of the pandemic for two decades and has an estimated prevalence rate of 25 percent. Zimbabwe declared the disease a national disaster in 1999 and launched an HIV/AIDS trust fund, financed by a three percent levy on income tax, to assist programmes tackling the disease.